Some people have no trouble waking up by themselves at a desired time early in the morning. However, the majority of us find it difficult to wake up on a dark morning without some sort of mechanical awakening device.
For several years it has been recognized that the current methods of waking up from a deep sleep in order to get on with the day's work are just unacceptable. The most common mechanisms currently available for awakening sleeping people are buzzers, radios, snooze alarms, flashing lights, etc., all of which awaken the sleeping person with a shock due to sudden loud noise or sudden bright light. The detrimental effects of a sudden awakening could extend beyond mere early morning irritability to having an adverse effect on working efficiency during the entire day.
Research work on circadian rhythm in the human body has been led by Dr. Charles Czeisler of Harvard University. His work proves the importance of light in setting our biological clocks. His work has not, however, solved the problem of how to simulate a natural dawn in a dark bedroom.
Recently some inventors have tried to address the problem. Chalfant, U.S. Pat. No. 3,631,450 (1971) developed a machine which produces a harmonic tone of increasing intensity, but which does not deal with the important effect of light. Baylor, U.S. Pat. No. 3,727,395 (1973) and Shaffer, U.S. Pat. No. 5,008,865 (1991) have worked out ways to achieve a gradual increase of light intensity, one in which a clock causes the light to turn on, and the other in which the light causes an alarm to ring. Neither of these addresses the problem of creating a gradually increasing sound. All of this prior art does, however, indicate the interest of many people in improving the present modes of forced waking from a deep sleep.